Kahenraz wrote on 2024-01-25, 23:45:
It's also important to take your CPU into consideration as well. I upgraded my video card several times in the 2000s, even up to a GeForce 6800 GT, without realizing that my Pentium 1.4 Ghz (later upgraded to 1.😎 was holding everything back. That and my 256MB of RAM made it anemic by Windows XP, but RDRAM was expensive and I decided to hold out for a complete upgrade instead. It was quite torturous by the end.
Although I am bias through the lens of nostalgia, I honestly feel that a 6800 GT is more than enough for a pleasurable XP experience. The benchmarks were unbelievable at release compared to previous generations.
There is quite a bit of overlap when it comes to winXP and Win Vista/7 era games. In theory, any game that does not require DX10/11 will run great on XP - that includes games up to 2010 or even 2012 in some (rare) cases.
XP era games for most people are probably Doom 3, Far Cry, NFS Underground, Homeworld 2 and so on, but for me the XP era stretches out to include STALKER, Fallout 3, Crysis, Bioshock, CoD 1-4, Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40k and so on. For most of these later games a 6800GT is.... insuficient, especially if you want to game at higher resolutions (1600x1200) with eye candy on. My personal favorite late-XP era cards are the GTX 280 and the Radeon 4870, but I've build XP(ish) rigs using i7 Nehalem platforms and Radeon 7970 / GTX 760 video cards. I like to enjoy retro games with full eye candy.
Before you say anything, I know all these 2006 onwards games will run perfectly happily on modern machines, but I keep these on older rigs together with 4:3 monitors, witch I think they look better on. Some of them anyway.
